Going green… Step 2, Recycling
Recycling. Seems like a big idea, but it doesn’t involve a lot of work. It’s so easy everyone can, and should be doing it.
We are fortunate enough to have curb side recycling that comes once every 2 weeks. It costs $5 per month to participate. When you sign up they send a ginormous rolling bin to your house, it must be 120 gallons. They accept paper, cardboard, metals, glass, and plastics (1’s & 2’s). That gets about 75% of our recycling items. Plastics 3-7’s go in a separate tub that about once a month we take to a plastic recycling center on the southside of Indianapolis. This gets all of our plastics in the house, and the same place also takes paper/cardboard that I don’t get in our normal recycling.
Before we started recycling we threw away THREE 30 gallon bags of trash to the curb every week. Now we average one 13 gallon trash bag per week, and I like that improvement a lot. What I don’t like is my trash day being on Thursday. Since we’re home all day on the weekends that’s precisely when we generate the most trash. Since I don’t change the bags as often now (they aren’t filling up!) the bulk of the trash sits there through the week. It gets stinky. I may try some odor eating garbage bags I saw that just came out.
It’s been so successful at our house I’m going to try and get the wife to help me go around the neighborhood this spring and show people how to sign up. I also need to find a way to pretty up the huge bin on the side of the house. It’s an eyesore for the neighbor, and I don’t want him thinking recycling means ugly. About the only thing I can’t recycle is LO meat pieces, citrus rinds (I generate way too much for the compost pile), and odd ball scraps of trash.
Speaking of Composting… that’s step 3.
March 4, 2009
Posted in: Green, Recycling
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